The N100 seems to be everywhere - presumably it’s some kind of major leap forward in perf/watt or perf/$ versus, eg, J4125? For those in the know, is an N100 mini-pc currently the best place to start for a kid’s “my first Linux PC”?
A few months ago Intel has launched a refresh of Alder Lake N, with the code name Amston Lake, which are branded as belonging to the Atom x7000 series and Radxa said that there will be future variants of Radxa X4 that will use Amston Lake.
An alternative to Radxa X4 for the cases when its minimum size and its minimum price are not essential is Odroid H4 ($100 without memory) or Odroid H4+ ($140 without memory). That has the Nano-ITX size (5" by 5") and a big heatsink that can work even passively, fanless.
The Alder Lake N/Amston Lake CPUs have the advantage of peripherals with higher speed than any competing Arm CPUs.
Radxa X4 has 3 independent 10 Gb/s USB ports plus 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet plus 32 Gb/s M.2 PCIe socket. The best competing Arm-based computers, with RK3588 or with MediaTek Genio 1200 have at most 3 independent 5 Gb/s USB ports. All the Arm-based boards that appear to have many USB ports incorporate an USB hub, so those ports are not independent and their aggregate throughput is limited to 5 Gb/s.
Another great advantage is that the Intel GPU is not only much faster than the Arm GPUs, but it has public documentation and it has much better software support.
A N100 inside a fanless case is a great setup. I hope some of these low-power Intel CPUs start popping up in laptops, where competition for Apple M is truly welcome.
BTW, this is the first time I've noticed Intel could compete with ARM on performance + energy efficiency + price. Has someone already investigated how this happened? Do ARM royalties went so high up or Intel does price dumping?
Intel finally got some competition and had to get off their ass for a change!
There, no investigation required! :)
Additionally I managed to get gpu passthrough working with the integrated graphics. My box is physically located below a TV- so I’ve got one VM running Bazzite for gaming, outputting over the HDMI. It’s perfect for streaming games from my gaming pc to the couch. Bluetooth and USB is also passed through to the VM without issue for controllers.
I run TrueNAS with my storage. Give a GPU to a main system (Bazzite/Fedora/NixOS). Distro hopping is one VM away.
I don't run Windows guests.
Always look at what people say about a motherboards IOMMU groups.
On mine I can pcie passthrough 4 of the 8 SATA ports for TrueNAS
I strongly doubt that. Otherwise premium (by Apple standards at least) or midrange specs laptop but with a slow CPU wouldn't be that popular.
It makes sense in a very cheap (< $300) device but add 32 GB of RAM, a decent screen and chassis and it would be competing with significantly more expensive laptops with a proper CPUs. Seems like an extremely niche product.
The typical specs of the price range mentioned above are FHD and 8GB RAM, both features are a few times worst laptop compared to QHD dislay and 32GB RAM.
Why? They can already buy a Lenovo/HP/etc. laptop for <500$, FHD and 16 GB RAM (and most in that price range seem to have upgradeable storage/memory).
I'm not sure the $50-100 or so saved on the CPU would be enough to significantly improve build quality or a much better screen.
The N100 just just doesen't seem to have that many advantages over something like:
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_processor_n1...
Yes, you get to save 5-15W or so, but you get a much slower chip with a way worse GPU. Still seems very niche.
I'd love to see a rehash of that idea with the performance actually being "good enough", but I think that's probably why vendors have been burned and don't want to explore that form factor space again soon.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend those (especially the cubietruck) these days, but there are lots of Single Board Computers (SBC) out there besides RPi.[0]
The downsides are that it's single-channel memory, which I'm not overly thrilled about, personally. Although I understand it's an important element of keeping the cost down, both in terms of die cost and also the systems integration around it. One channel = 1 socket... or soldered memory with half the modules.
That said, the overall package speaks for itself. It's fine. Which is the standard to meet in this class of product. It costs less than $100 for a loaded rig that you plug in and run windows on, what are you really expecting here?
And when you drive down the cost that far, a whole bunch of new use-cases open up. This is what the social implication of moore's law has always been - that eventually your fridge will have a computer with hundreds of MIPS of performance, because it's so cheap why not?
And that was the argument for the RPi initially. Other than the "they'll use it to run computer labs!" which was silly and never materialized either.
Been a big fan of Gemini Lake Plus for a lot of years too. It’s cheap and good enough (and with the right modules you can stick 16gb or more (tested up to 32gb) of memory in it, which makes it totally acceptable for light desktop use. Same thing. It’s good enough.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3667vs5157vs885/Intel-Celeron-J4125-vs-Intel-N100-vs-Intel-i7-2820QM
Not got an X4 yet, but from the link above, it should be about 50% faster than the EliteBook, which in turn is 50% faster than the X2L / Palmshell.
There is an even cheaper version Odroid H4, at $100, which has a single 2.5 Gb/s port instead of two and it lacks SATA ports for HDDs (the fewer peripheral controllers also lead to a lower idle power consumption).
But this was in the context of someone who has an N100 but prefers running a J-series over due to lower power consumption. It seems like it should be worth the effort?
The N100 can be a fair step up compared to Rpi5 but even RK3588 is already 8 cores. Would be a shame if many of the current generation of exciting hackable x86 mini-platforms lock in at the N100 as it will feel obsolete years earlier the the N305.
I run/ran stuff on both, as well as various ARM SBCs and previous generations like J4125/N5XXX. Considering the core-count, RK3588 is still a better pick for many use-cases unless single-thread performance is that important. Benchmark comparison: https://bret.dk/intel-n100-a-challenge-to-arm/
The only thing I'd reserve judgement on is the tendency to throttle. I haven't got far enough to characterize it, but it's not clear how much value those extra cores will add over the n100 with TDP settings tweaked down in the BIOS, and if leaving the n305 to run at max TDP, heat/noise/cost/temperature-related instability may start to become an issue, especially when packing other hot components like a decent SSD into the tiny cases they come in.
The reason why RK3588 may beat N100 in multi-threaded benchmarks is that the latter has a very low base clock frequency, due to the higher power consumption when all the cores are active. N100 needs a better cooling than RK3588 in order to reach its maximum possible multi-threaded speed. With good enough cooling that will prevent the drop in clock frequency, N100 will beat easily RK3588 in any benchmark, because the Intel Gracemont cores have a speed similar to the Arm Cortex-A78 cores and much greater than the Cortex-A76 cores of RK3588.
It should be noted that Radxa X4, due to the constraints of the credit card size, has only a 32-bit DRAM interface. So its -4800 memory is equivalent with a -2400 memory of the bigger N100 boards, which use a 64-bit DRAM interface. The good RK3588 boards also use a 64-bit DRAM interface (with a somewhat lower speed, e.g. -4267), so they may win in benchmarks that are limited by memory bandwidth.
However in the applications in which I am interested for such a small board like Radxa X4 (like a network router/firewall or a controller for some custom hardware) the performance is almost always limited by the speed of the peripheral interfaces, so Radxa X4 will be better than any existing Arm-based SBC.
(I also have an X4, am waiting for an SSD for it for proper testing)
Any old desktop from a garage sale (if you can find one). People are practically giving them away these days, everyone wants tablets/phones now. We scored a quite decent one, complete with monitor, mouse, keyboard, etc. for like $25 (IIRC)!
In fairness, that was a few years ago, but I am sure there are deals to be had if you look around.
I would not recommend ARM/SBC for "first GNU/Linux computer" necessarily, you will likely have an easier time on x86, as much as I hate to say it.
Even the R.Pi 5 loses against the N100.
https://www.tomshardware.com/raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-5-squ...